Early Reddit was pretty boring unless you were interested in programming or technology. The first big bump in users from digg was during the HD-DVD key fracas. The ham-handed response by digg to even talking about the key leak pissed off a lot of users. They were already simmering due to astroturfing/Payola by "power users" (we'd call them influencers today).

Then a huge influx came after the digg v4 rollout that basically turned the site into a giant advertising channel, more so than it had been.

I'm no Reddit insider but I got turned onto it in 2005 or so and watched the digg user influxes over the years.

Honestly wish that signing comments was supported in more forums/aggregators. I know I can do it manually but I want verification built into the site.

1. Recommendation engines, and other clever ways to drive up engagements.

2. Marketing. AOL's marketing was generally ahead of other tech companies at the time. Modern platforms have marketing on par with any other consumer brand. They are specifically great at FOMO, user acquisition, and feeling like a basic utility for modern life.

3. Network effect. Meta reports almost 3B monthly active users. What did AOL max out at? 20M?

The Reddit Mafia

They posted content using fake accounts to stimulate adoption.

To my recollection they allowed a lot of skeevy (illegal and/or immoral) content to proliferate.

I think they probably ran at a loss for a long time; leaning heavily on volunteer personnel.

?

Discussions tend to deteriorate quickly and quality comments with sources get buried. That isn't how it all started. I'll shut down my last account soon after overwriting and deleting all the posts.

It's fitting that Imgur is also gonna scratch all the content they have from people who never made Imgur accounts. I have a lot of tutorials, marked-up photos, etc that I used to help people thru issues on some of those niche forums involving home and auto repairs. It's good to know all that will be gone.

I'll be down to one site for online engagement and news.

And while digg's implosion had reddit as an alternative, in 2023 who is the alternative to reddit?

Front page feels like clickbait and "get angry for engagement metrics"

The day old.reddit.com stops working is the day I stop using reddit completely, I detest their new UI so much that it’s essentially unusable for me.

Complete with deleting my account for closure. This is what I recommend. It's pretty much facebook, pure dark UX at that point.

Reddit got popular because Digg screwed up their comment threading. It's sad to see reddit is starting to make anti-user mistakes like digg. Maybe they think they can force it because there isn't a competent competitor.

The problem with all of these sites is they start to service the lowest common denominator in the name of next quarters profits. As their websites become more hostile to the educated, the quality of content drops and profit goes up, but the golden goose is slowly being strangled.

Reddit was fantastic around the time of digg because the average user appeared to be college educated or greater. Celebrities like Randall Monroe were submitting high quality content. It was common for a literal expert to write a well thought out post. Now it's an "Americas funniest home videos" feed of fart jokes with your liberal aunt and conservative uncle having an argument in the background.

It seems so clear to me that billionaires mean we can't have nice things. Twitter and Reddit both promoted a "truth to power" free speech ideology, and now billionaires are coercing these companies into becoming cess pits that reflect the worst parts of humanity. Power doesn't like to be threatened so they will destroy the weapon.

I still can't decide if these companies are being destroyed because they promote a "no more billionaires" ideology, or if it is simply capitalistic greed and the search for next quarters profits.

It makes a lot of sense since each "subreddit" could be its own server.

for example, bypass paywalls clean was removed from most (all?) web extension stores and now has to be sideloaded. I don't think most non techies would be comfortable doing this, so maybe something like a firefox distribution (a la librewolf) would be ideal, so you could build off the other extensions there, and the anti tracking tech built into firefox.

Can anyone explain this one to me? My passwords are impossible to type/memorize, and the password manager's Firefox extension sucks too much to rely on it. It's clearing the clipboard 10 seconds later anyway, so they website's not protecting me.

Not really possible if a paywalled website is a true paywall. Many paywalled websites don't even expose their content to crawlers.

I also think that, philosophically, the majority of the user base being able to bypass paywall isn't healthy for the Internet. It will only make content quality decrease and advertisement aggression increase. You can see this effect come into play with pages that use anti-adblocking tools, where you can't see anything until you disable ad blocking.

> Tab freeze for tabs not in focus - save CPU and battery energy

Chrome energy saver mode? Safari seems to effectively do this, tabs seem to be pretty dead until you are using them. I would also ask what kind of need there is to save battery life above and beyond present technology. Modern laptops sold on the market now can be in a web browser for an entire workday (e.g., ASUS Zenbook 13 OLED, any MacBook M1/M2).

Almost everything on this list is already available with browser extensions or existing browsers.

Reddit in the post digg-exodus days seemed like a veneer of 'news' covering one of _the_ seedy underbellies of the web. Not only, but to a large extent a hive of scum and villainy; not a chan-site but similarly lacking in societal respectability.

?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

The closet was unlocked and he used a regular guest access to the MIT network. Also he was downloading documents that were created by using public funds.

> There are a lot of much more legal ways to make the Internet freer. He was a smart guy and knew what he was doing was highly illegal.

There are always other and more effective ways to everything. With this kind of argumentation one always must come to the conclusion that it is best to do nothing. Also let's not forget that he did much more than downloading documents at MIT.

> think that this is the major issue with martyrdom. Aaron is remembered for "fighting the man" but the real story is a significantly muddier than that. A martyr's death makes it seem like the martyr did nothing wrong even if they did.

That's a definition for martyrdom I have not heard before. Usually a martyr is simply defined as a person who is willing to suffer or even die for a cause, belief, or principle that they consider to be of great importance.

> Sorry, I know this is kind of a dumb and not so productive soap box. Oh well.

I will simply never understand why people will argument so strongly against their self interests.

Even after the new lockdowns ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33352567 ) the building in question is one of the ones still open to the general public. Tossing your equipment into an equipment closet, to access the exact same network you can access elsewhere but with reduced risk of some vagrant walking off with it is the same thing most people would do if they needed to leave some equipment connected and didn't have access to a more secure location.

There is just no way to deny that what Aaron was being prosecuted for was 'downloading too many scientific papers while having an anti-monopolist mindset'. Any mere urban explorer who arguably trespassed into a school facility would at most be facing a local trespassing charge, and in a case like this where the facility was expressly open to the general public and their unauthorized access was to an unlocked wiring closet, those charges likely wouldn't have stuck (or wouldn't have resulted in a very consequential sentence). Usually trespassers, when caught, are just kicked out and not charged at all. Exactly the sort of "petty crime" not-"highly-illegal" stuff you argue it wasn't.

Is it unfortunate that the feds had an option to cloak their almost nakedly political prosecution behind a complaint of dubious deeds? Wouldn't it have been better (for him) if he'd asked one of his many friends that had offices at MIT if he could leave a computer in their office? Sure. But we don't get to pick the cases that are used to defend our rights, the prosecutors get to pick... and they pick ones they think they have the best odds of winning, or in other words the cases with the best chance of letting them erode our rights, the best chance of having a chilling effect, the best chance of not resulting in a loss for the state that instead strengthens the freedoms they're trying to undermine.

So it's almost inevitable that our privacy is defended through the lens of accused pedophiles our our freedom of speech through obvious racists. The case being unfortunate is a _default_. But by comparison with those, prosecuting Aaron Swartz over this was like federally prosecuting hippy anti-war protesters putting up posters for _littering_. Wouldn't it have been better if did nothing that could be accused of being littering? Yes but the prosecutor would simply have waited for a different case where someone did, and it would just be that case being used to chill the public's freedoms. We could be a lot worse off than fighting for access to (primarily publicly funded!) knowledge through an accused trespasser. The choice of case would matter personally to the accused, but not to us-- if anything it's not hard to imagine a case much more muddled than one against Aaron that they could have used, say someone with a arguable commercial angle or a connection to a hostile state interest. Whatever case is being used as a proxy to attack the rights of all of the rest of us will always have some extra angle making it more complicated.

Sadly Aaron didn't get the support he needed from the public (including myself), he wasn't in the right place to see it through, and the intensity of federal prosecution is just out of odds with producing justice in the face of potentially vulnerable targets. It did end the political aspirations of the prosecutor, for whatever its worth.

If Digg hadn't made the v2.0 mistake; Reddit wouldn't be where it was now.

The accounts may of not been fake, but reddit for sure had many plants; it was even boasted by the administration team prior Conde Nest. And now it's more blatant than before.

Don't make me go through the effort to dig them up.

As for the order of events, I wasn't clear. I meant they talked about it on HackerNews but not contemporaneously.

Pretending to be different people to post qualifies as 'fake posts'.

Fake it till you make it, or fraud?

Either way it's still bullshit.